Raid on the Sun(4)

The macabre, almost routine cycle of bloodbaths in Baghdad finally came to an end at three o’clock in the morning, July 17, 1968, when the Ba’thists stormed the presidential palace and ousted Qassem, and al-Bakr, the new prime minister and commander in chief, proclaimed the Age of Revolution.

It would be another year before Saddam would emerge from the shadows behind the al-Bakr throne. Then it was revealed that Saddam was second in command to his uncle, vice president of the secretive, all-powerful Revolutionary Command Council—and had been since the earliest days of the regime.



Halfway across the world, the carnage that roiled his homeland and filled his father’s letters with worry seemed far away and almost dreamlike to Khidhir Hamza, as though he were hearing about someone else’s Third World nation. The young middle-class Iraqi had lived in the United States for six years, studying at MIT and working for his doctorate in theoretical nuclear physics at Florida State University. Hamza’s world had been filled, like all American students at the time, with campus antiwar demonstrations and the “flower power” culture. Indeed, Khidhir felt more American than Shi’ite Iraqi. To him the Ba’thi sounded like some organization from another century, if not from another planet. Hamza had received his doctorate and just begun teaching at a small black college, Fort Valley State in southern Georgia, when in 1970 he received a notice from the new Ba’thist Iraqi government. He was expected to return to Baghdad and repay his government student loan or his father would be held “accountable,” a threat that in Iraq in those days could mean prison. It was a nightmare, an inconceivable turn of events Khidhir and his father had never even considered when they signed the loan document in 1962 under an entirely different regime. Only twenty-nine, unmarried, tall, with deep brown eyes and soft, light features, the young professor knew nothing about the Ba’th Party except what he had been told by friends—that “these guys are not fooling around. They kill people.”

Hamza had no choice but to return to Iraq. He reluctantly resigned his teaching position, organized his affairs, shipped what few possessions he had to his father’s home, and took the seventeen-hour flight to Baghdad, not knowing what to expect but fearing the worst. Bleary-eyed, Hamza stared out the porthole as his plane descended to the hot desert runway below. The Baghdad airport looked run-down, bleached of color and life by years of sun and wind and neglect. Carrying his own bags through the eerily deserted terminal, he caught a beat-up old Citroën taxi outside, which drove him to the Kuwait Hotel (the irony of the name would not be apparent for another twenty years, of course). There, a request awaited him from Dr. Ali Attia, director general of Iraq’s impressive-sounding Nuclear Research Center of Atomic Energy, that he stop by for a visit.

Located south of Baghdad at al-Tuwaitha, past the al-Rasheed military base and the Iraqi army medical school and next to a tiny village-slum, the center was then a cluster of concrete government buildings surrounded by a high steel fence. Although al-Bakr was prime minister, everywhere Hamza looked on the center’s walls hung portraits of Saddam Hussein, smiling under the thick Jerry Colonna mustache and wearing his trademark black fedora. Attia informed the nuclear scientist that he was to start as a researcher in the physics department, at $150 a month.

“That’s only a tenth of what I was making in the United States,” Hamza protested.

“We do not have the budget to pay more at present,” Attia said. “But that will change.”

Attia confided that Hamza was to be groomed to become his number-two man. Over the next weeks and months the scientist discovered he had joined an impressive team of Western-educated Iraqi scientists that included such respected researchers as Dr. Hussein al-Shahristani, Dr. Moyesser al-Mallah, and Dr. Abdullah Abul-Khail. All had been brought to al-Tuwaitha, he would discover, under the personal direction of Saddam Hussein. Though unbeknownst to Hamza at the time, Saddam, in fact, was not only vice president of the Ba’th Revolutionary Command Council, RCC, he had seen fit to appoint himself head of Iraq’s atomic energy commission.

Al-Bakr was allowed to rule the far-flung Ba’th bureaucracy, but it was Saddam who plotted and wheeled and dealed discreetly behind the scenes for ten years to build Iraq into the dominant Arab power in the Persian Gulf—the modern Mesopotamia he had dreamed of. Far from the dumb thug his enemies liked to portray him as being, Saddam had impeccable instincts and a quick mind. In 1970 he foresaw a multipower world, with Iraq joining the Western powers as one of the pillars of global influence. Nasser had failed in his gambit to unite the Arab nations under Egypt. But Saddam would succeed where Nasser had failed, because he knew that the key was WMD, weapons of mass destruction—especially nuclear weapons.